Compression & decompression in custom components

Hi Lithium Developers,

For coding a custom component, are there Freemarker context object functions available which can (1) lossless-ly compress lots of text / data and (2) decompress later? I see utils.base64.encode() and .decode() are available, but as far as I can tell that encode function doesn't compress data. I see utils.digest.md5Hex() and other related functions are available but I'm guessing those are for hashing only and we wouldn't be able to decode later to get all of the original data.

Have any Lithium customers ever had Lithium Professional Services expose custom compression and decompression functions for them?

Thank you,

Dave